...Advertising for the iPhone

Specifically, this advert where the scruffy white guy is chatting to the polished Asian chick.


Exhibit 1:

Now, I don't own an iPhone, and I don't intend to. I've got three beefs with them, the first being that I already own both an iPod and a mobile phone, thank you very much; secondly, since I own an iPod I know how temperamental the bastards can be, why push your luck by adding the ability to make calls? Lastly, and probably my main reason for not getting an iPhone 4: the touch screen. Not only do touch screen phones not seem to want to acknowledge that I am indeed a sentient being, making me question my own mortality every time I try and fail to send Gary Glitter jokes via text, but I'm also sadly endowed with incredibly chubby fingers, which means that when I try to update my Facebook status to something insipid like, 'Studying is booooring...' it comes out looking like a cross between Esperanto and a rural dialect of Klingon. Anyway, that's not what's important here; as usual, I just got incredibly sidetracked by moaning. Here are two (irrational) reasons as to why I think this advert was made, and why they are stupid. 


1) The ridiculous reason I made up out of boredom on my walk home past Carphone Warehouse: They want to appeal to nerds


Everyone knows that nerds like Anime and Japanese chicks. And everyone also knows that nerds love continuously updating their computer and mobile technology, right? So my first theory is this: Steve Jobs and his crew of alien slave workers, the ones that crashed into Roswell in the fifties (how else do you explain 40,000 songs in a 10cm by 6cm plastic brick?) sat around in their underground cave plotting their world domination, when suddenly, Steve got a wonderful idea. In order to further milk the nerd community for all they're worth, he decided to give them false hope that hot Asian girlfriends come with owning an iPhone. Specifically, the newer 4th gen model that can be used for video calling, possibly the most pointless addition to a mobile since they made that app on how to avoid brain cancer. (Protip: don't use your phone.) 


The only problem is, the nerds of this world are not a united species. They are separated into different tribes, torn apart by their distrust in each other's taste in comics books, along with differences of opinion regarding the outcome of a fight between a pirate and a ninja. Maybe an Anime nerd (aka Otaku, Weeaboo, 4chan user) who loves Japanese ladies would find this advert appealing, and maybe an Apple nerd (aka Mac Fag, Hipster, Rich kid with too much fucking money), who loves Steve Jobs endorsed technology, would also find this advert appealing, but only the rare 'Appime' nerd would be enthused by both aspects at once. I drew a handy diagram to help you out:


Exhibit 2: 

I think I have a bright future in creating computer graphics.

Basically, there are some - maybe quite a lot - of people who like both shiny new technology and girls who could pass for a member of AKB48. But you cannot entice all nerds with the promise of a hot Asian relationship. So don't insult their intelligence; they are smarter than us all.

After pulling apart the issue some more I decided to add more data to the sides of my diagram.

2) The much more likely reason: Political Correctness & International Appeal

Two nationalities! Two whole races represented in one advert! That will cut costs, surely? And appease those liberal lefties: y'know, the ones that hate capitalism yet love spending money on useless technological fads. I mean, just Photoshop some squiggles over the English writing and this advert becomes Asia friendly (oh, apart from the multi-racial relationship playing out). Yeah, I understand political correctness and the need to appear both international and interracial, but this doesn't look anything like the typical White Guy/Asian Girl courtship that one can witness in any Roppongi club on any night of the week.

iPhone ownership not pictured, but implied.

Having said that, maybe people really do care about the issue of Political Correctness?

Exhibit 3:

It's a pie chart therefore you cannot argue with its logic.

Anyway, I don't understand the point of trying to be PC if you're just going to half-arse it. I mean, why are other races not represented? Why are only 'safe' and cliche interracial couples chosen? What is my actual point?

I think what we can take from this is I really need to stop writing bullshit at 5.30 am.

...Procrastination

Unless you absolutely love writing essays, which I’m sure most of you do (along with attending 9am lectures, revising for ten exams in the space of one panic-filled evening, and eating shit) there were most likely occasions when you’d do anything to avoid actually getting down to writing one (Or in the case of my poor flatmate, one a week).This list is a rundown of the tried-and-tested activities that I have used for procrastination purposes, which I’m certain will ring a few bells, unless you’re fairly studious, or more likely, an essay writing robot. Why not procrastinate some more by reading this list?

1.      
            1. Washing Up (also Tidying your room, Laundry)

If you’re like me, your kitchen most likely resembles the hell-pit from Withnail & I. Never mind something living among the dirty crockery; the beings in my old dorm kitchen were feral (and that’s just my flatmates, boom boom). But then essay time comes around, and suddenly those fifty plates piled precariously in the sink become priority number one.

I never understood why Withnail & I wasn't remade as a B-movie horror starring a tentacled, washing-up pile inhabiting monster

It’s like, I know that I’m only doing housework to avoid writing my essay, and I understand that subsequently, I’ll be writing said essay at 3am, with the help of five cans of red bull and a piece of sugary cereal to reward every five words written (yes, you’re right; this is far too specific to be anything other than personal experience). However, as I fail to do anything that takes effort and willpower (diets, studying, basic hygiene…), writing essays with time to spare seems like an impossible task. So cleaning is a perfect way to waste an hour or two - or five, depending on the state of the kitchen - without having to leave the apartment. Also, and most importantly, any cleaning activity is an accomplishment. So you can still feel that you’re doing something even though you’re not. YOU’RE REALLY NOT. WRITE THAT ESSAY! Actually don’t; stay to read the rest of this article.

2.  Long Shower (also Long bath, Manicures)

Not to have a wank or wash your hair, I’m talking about standing under the warm water for thirty minutes or longer purely to avoid doing any work. The basic washing routine was completed over twenty minutes ago; now you’re just raping the environment. You’re turning into a prune, your eyes are sore from the various assortment of chemicals that are hitting you from every angle and your flatmate’s banging on the door because she needs a piss and don’t you ever think of anyone but yourself you selfish bastard?!

The problem is what awaits you outside the shower. Once you’ve gotten past your frustrated and hysterical flatmate, you have to contend with the eerie glow of your computer monitor that seems to pierce through the darkness of your empty bedroom, the screen devoid of any content save for a single, unfinished sentence. It’s already 9pm and the deadline’s tomorrow, but you can’t let personal grooming go out of the window just for an essay, can you?

                   3. Snacking (also Late night vending machine dash, Buying redbull in bulk, Raiding kitchen cupboards at three in the morning)

Student version of Ready Steady Cook

At this point you still haven’t written much more than the (somewhat long-winded and pompous) essay title, and your computer clock is telling you that yes, it really is 21:39, despite you thinking it was only five minutes ago that you got out of the shower. However, for some inexplicable reason, and with a sudden intensity, you reason with yourself that you cannot possibly write the essay without any sort of snack, so you pop out to the local 24 hour corner shop in your pyjamas to buy red bull and Maryland cookies, as well as some fizzy Haribo. Starving kids in Africa walk miles for water, and they don’t even consume enough food to live on, let alone snack on two mars bars and a 2 litre bottle of diet coke. Still, I guess the threat of losing 2% of your essay mark a day for late submission isn’t as powerful as the threat of dehydration.

4.  YouTube videos (also Watching television, Watching a movie (or three))

Question: How many of these do you recognise? [click]

Question: When I say ‘autotune’ do you automatically think of this? [click]

Question: Do you know more about bad parenting than your local child services? [click]

….

You are your own worst enemy.


5. Facebook

3.15 am. Finally, you’ve cracked open the first book on your reading list. And of course, some student’s turned each page into the paper equivalent of a five year old girl’s bedroom, thanks to an extreme overuse of pink highlighter. After reading a paragraph, you get tired. You swig some more red bull. You have a cookie. You have another cookie. You read some more. Unbeknownst to you, in your tired state, you’re actually just reading the foreword about the scholar who wrote the damn book. You think to yourself, I’ll just check the internet for five seconds; I’ll just have a quick perusal of my social media websites (Maybe not in those words, but it equates to the same thing). Alas, that was your biggest mistake of the evening, which to be honest, was fairly unproductive from the second you woke up and said to yourself, I’m gonna finish that essay by ten tonight so I can watch a movie to reward myself after. Ha ha ha! Even your alarm clock seems to mockingly flash its neon numbers at you. Now it’s half three and you’re on your Facebook homepage, and what’s that? Some ugly chavvy girl from your old Secondary School is in a relationship? How? She always smelt of piss, and one time she even made out with a cocker spaniel (allegedly). How is she in a relationship with a human male? Click. Ah, that’s why. She’s dating the love child of a sumo wrestler and Worzel Gummidge.

After violating several privacy barriers (well, they choose to upload this stuff), and scrolling down your home page until it can’t load any more television/essay related statuses, drunken photos taken in gloomy nightclubs, and YouTube videos of men in their underwear dancing to Lady Gaga, you get caught in a vicious circle of checking friend’s profiles and looking at their photos. In particular, holiday albums, which could be anything from thirty-odd pictures of sunburnt torsos in Marbella to a month’s worth of snaps of the Australian bush (NOT leaked pictures of Dannii Minogue, I hasten to add).

Facebook is the enemy of the essay, as it brings down productivity levels to zero. Even furtive glances now and then add up to a huge lack of concentration. It’s 5:30 am by the time you actually start your essay, and the regret of procrastination that has slowly been seeping in all night has finally crashed the floodgates. However, you know that this essay ritual has gotten you passable marks up to now and it will continue to get you through the rest of your university career, right until some unlucky sap employs you in an actual job. No matter how you try to fight it, if you procrastinate once, you’re a procrastinator for life.

Now excuse me while I go off and finish my essay.

Oh my god, that girl who dropped out of first year is pregnant?

...Disney

Last September I had one of the best experiences in my life, the chance to spend a year abroad for study. At the partner institution there were various classes in English to choose from – and there was one class in particular that caught everybody’s eye. Despite most of the natives not having a clue what was going on, hiding in the back to avoid getting picked to answer a question, there were still plenty of them in attendance; exchange students too were crowding in, hoping to secure a seat. The lecture in question just happened to have one word in the title, one word that brought huge numbers to the lecture theatre that first day. That word was Disney.

The premise was great: each lecture we would watch and analyse something Disney related, be it a television programme, a film, or nature documentary. Predictably, most of the students were only interested in the first part, and switched off for the rest. Who cares about media analysis; let’s just enjoy the cartoon at face value, guys! But here’s the thing; I actually learned something in that class (something other than what little clothing some of the characters were dressed in). I actually enjoyed the analysis just as much as the skilfully made animation. Some of the points the Professor raised were slightly contentious: as some of my classmates suggested, sometimes people do analyse just for the sake of analysis, sometimes they do try and make patterns out of anything and everything to try and understand their surroundings a little better. You know, as interesting as a comparison of The Little Mermaid to Soviet Russia may be, it’s not likely based on any sort of reality.

Still, I learned a lot. I learnt, for instance, that as strong willed and kick-ass as some of the heroines may seem (see Jasmine et al.) their strings are still pulled by the men around them. I learnt that as minority-friendly as Disney wants to seem, the stereotypes in their movies are still incredibly deep-rooted and seemingly irreversible. However, what I didn’t learn was a satisfying answer to the main question posed by the course: are Disney movies good for our kids?

I’ll focus on the issue I found the most intriguing: Disney and sexism. We were told that Disney not only promotes an unrealistic representation of women, but that it also fries out young girls’ minds and makes them want to turn into a servile, pandering version of Pamela Anderson. Oh I know. You’re thinking that the relationships in Disney movies were sweet and romantic, and that one day you’ll end up with a guy like that. Think again! I’m going to ruin this for you like it was ruined for me. (No, I honestly loved that class. Honestly.) Sweeping unrealistic expectations of romance aside, my eyes were opened to incredibly different and contentious views about certain ‘unhealthy’ relationships in Disney movies. Did Ariel transfer her desire for freedom onto a human male, thus going from being controlled by her father to being controlled by her husband? (I did warn you.) Could Belle and the Beast’s romance in Beauty and the Beast represent an abusive relationship? (It gets worse.) Is Jasmine merely a sexual ‘prize’ in the eyes of the males around her? (You can still back away to maintain your Disney innocence.) Vivian and Edward in Pretty Woman: could this relationship last in real life? Is Vivian using consumerism as a way to empower herself, and therefore can she ever be truly emancipated if she is ‘kept’ by a man? (Ok, you’re still here? Let’s destroy some dreams!)

If we look at the two movies Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, we can see a connection between them, which is the illusion of choice. Disney sets up two males vying over one female, one because of purely self-seeking reasons and the other because of love. In other words, the audience is manipulated to pick a side, or to phrase it more accurately, to pick the side. For instance, while Gaston is set up to look like, for lack of a better expression, a complete douche bag, Jafar is just downright evil. (Kind of sexy too, but I guess you don’t see that when you’re eight years old.) The charming underdog Aladdin and the nervously bumbling Beast wander in and we’re smitten. However, just because Saint Aladdin and the Beast supposedly love their objects of affection, do they really make a decent alternative to the ‘bad guys’? Aladdin is a compulsive liar, incredibly cocky in an attempt to cover up his low self-worth, and is possibly more in love with the idea of being a Prince than being with Jasmine. Meanwhile, the Beast’s idea of a fun afternoon is to yell at and starve his guests while ripping apart his decor, imprisoning Belle in the minute chance that she will help him turn back into a human. In fact, all of these males are using the women in these movies for some selfish reason or another; why can’t the women choose option C and pick somebody better, or option D, which is to live happily ever after alone? The fact is, there is no choice; either way the woman gets fucked, and not in a good way.

Exhibit 1:

Cock jokes are always funny. Not pictured: Jafar and his cock.

The Little Mermaid and Cinderella also have a connection to each other, in that they pin the future happiness of their protagonist onto a fallible human being. A male that they have got to know in the shortest possible time: while Ariel has a shipwreck and three days to get to know Eric, with the constant pressure of having to get him to fall in love with her or end up as a piece of flotsam in Ursula’s freaky sea garden, Cinderella only has until the stroke of midnight. (I know that it adds a sense of urgency to the story, but I still can’t understand why it was necessary for Cinderella to leave at twelve on the dot. Maybe I’m just ungrateful, but what an incredibly annoying addendum. Old people, eh.) Ariel sacrifices her entire family to be with her man, mistakenly believing that it is he, and not her independence, that she had long desired when she lamented her tail below the surface. They may seem like similar sentiments, but ‘Part of that world’ and ‘part of your world’ are worlds apart. Cinderella, meanwhile, seems to be getting a better quality of life, but what with a husband who has seemingly had a personality transplant (maybe he donated it to Brian Blessed?) and a King obsessed with having grandkids (ride on his back like a horse - his dream, not mine. Should we consult Freud?) it doesn’t seem like Cinderella’s going to have much fun in that Palace, even if she doesn’t have to clean the drapes every second Tuesday.

And then we reach the modern day fairytale, proving that even us cynics can find true love, as long as we don’t mind walking around Central LA at 3 in the morning wearing a bikini and hooker boots; yes, it’s Pretty Woman. First of all, think back a little. Can you honestly tell me that at any point in the movie the protagonist ceases to be a prostitute? Because I can’t. Here’s another rhetorical question. Can material objects ever bring you real happiness? Disney seems to think so, and so did I until I reached the age of fourteen. I just ask that because Edward in his present state of mind is incapable of having a genuinely fulfilling relationship with any woman. All Julia Roberts is getting out of that relationship is ugly nineties twinsets and a deep seated complex about how Richard Gere doesn’t find her attractive enough, when the fault lies with both of them. We love our flawed anti-heroes, don’t we ladies? And we lovingly pass this way of thinking onto our innocent daughters, with saccharine movies about how emotionally fucked-up men will change if they’d only find the right woman, and that woman is definitely you, right? You’re going to be the one for him, even if he never lives up to his promises, cannot provide anything towards the family, is emotionally distant...(Okay, take a deep breath Alice...)

The truth is, Disney movies are not immediately damaging to our children. However, like most media of our time, there is an element of ideology embedded in every movie, ideology that your daughter will subconsciously consume and keep with her forever. Disney wants your daughter to follow her dreams, but only if those dreams remain within the framework of a patriarchal society that is near impossible to rise above. Girls are literally programmed to accept psychologically damaging relationships as romantic.

I love Disney movies, but if I want to learn how to be a successful and fulfilled woman, I know I have to look elsewhere.

...Lady Gaga

First of all, I just want to state very clearly that I like the music of Lady Gaga, I really do. Her catchy melodies are guaranteed to get me up on the dance floor, and it’s been many an evening where I’ve unreservedly sang along to one of her songs at Karaoke (or three, or five...) The point is, Lady Gaga deserves a proper analysis, because despite her millions of fans and hugely popular records, not to mention her avant-garde style of dressing and shocking stage antics, Stefani Germanotta leaves me feeling a little cold. Is she an artist? Personally I have never regarded her as such. For me, her outfits and lyrics are both devoid of any meaning, and her way of speaking is both patronising and pretentious. She wants you to love her or hate her, but honestly, until she brings out another amazing record, I’m feeling kind of apathetic.

At first glance she seems to be very different to anything out there, a very unique and talented songwriter. However, my first point is: does her superficial uniqueness equate to groundbreaking musician? In a world of highly sexualised bimbos and bland Indie outfits, is a woman wearing nothing but meat really bringing anything fresh to the music scene? (Meat? Fresh? Oh forget it...) My second point: what exactly is so incredibly different about Lady Gaga, anyway? If we’re judging on music alone, then while being very good at writing catchy hooks, her songs are easily comparable to other female solo artists of this generation. Many have said that she is not merely emulating her (rather predictable) musical heroes, that she is blatantly copying them and churning it out as her own work. If it wasn’t for the eerily hypnotic videos and the laughable outfit based publicity stunts, her music would be seen as quite pedestrian, if particularly catchy. Let’s try and untangle the music from the image. She sings about fame, about parties, about social anxiety, topics that singers have covered many times since Elvis first picked up a microphone. The girl could leave the house in nothing but a piano key necktie and flippers, but until her lyrics are original and have a deeper meaning to them, then I’m not buying this ‘unique’ label. (Besides, we all know Madonna did it first and slightly better, even if nowadays her image is more comparable to the child snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.)

Lady Gaga also involves herself with issues that touch her heart, like the inequality of homosexuals, and...wait, that’s about it. But that’s admirable, right? Surely it has nothing to do with the fact that she has a huge gay following? Ok, too cynical. Anyone who helps the cause of other more marginalised people, whether for completely altruistic reasons or not, should be given some kudos. However. Dedicating Alejandro to her gay fans, when the vague lyrics seem to depict either a heterosexual relationship between a third party female and the listener (“’Cos she’s no good for you, no good for you”), or between herself and several third party males (“Don’t call my name / I’m not your babe”)? Confusing. It seems as though Lady Gaga can stand on a platform and preach about gay rights, and have homosexual males writhing provocatively in her videos, but touching lyrics about a normal, loving homosexual relationship? Unlikely.

Speaking of her fans, I read a really interesting article by the columnist Camille Paglia recently, which, although perhaps a little too critical for the sake of being controversial (ironic really, given the subject of her article) did raise some interesting points concerning Lady Gaga and her ‘Little Monsters’. To sum it up, Paglia claims that Lady Gaga treats her fans as though they were mentally damaged, and that only she can understand their problems and issues. From her article in The Sunday Times (12/10/10): “[Lady Gaga] constantly touts her symbiotic bond with her fans, the “little monsters”, who she inspires to “love themselves” as if they are damaged goods in need of her therapeutic repair.” This troubles me. Removing taboos from both depression and mental illness is admirable, but glamorising it? Giving it a name that promotes inclusion? Anyway, as much as Lady Gaga protests that she herself was also an outsider, the reason she gives is superficial and probably untrue: all the girls were blonde at school, so her and her brunette hair didn’t fit in. And now she’s blonde. This privileged young woman, who went to a prestigious school in New York, who had support from loving parents every step of the way, who was bankrolled by music agencies to begin her career; how can she hold herself up as a beacon for emotionally unstable young people? How can she ever hope to reach these people, to really grab hold of their hearts and say, “I understand what you’re going through!” when her entire public persona appears to be false? She claims to love her fans more than any artist has ever done so in the entire history of pop music, yet she gives them nothing. They give her their adoration, souls, and money. She feeds them an elaborate network of lies and a false empathy, and to make matters worse, her music is also soulless, full of disconnected, unfeeling lyrics such as, “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick!” Lady Gaga never has a relationship with men, she just fucks them. Fans, I see a pattern emerging.

To get back to my opening point though, contentious as it is, I personally have never respected Lady Gaga as an artist. Not in the meaning of a musician (which in itself is a completely dreadful employment of the word; not every painter is an artist, why is every singer?) but in the original meaning of ‘one who makes art’. Here is a woman who (literally) wears her politics on her sleeve, who claims that there is great meaning in everything that she does. This is clearly not true. Lady Gaga is a young woman who started off a semi-talented musician, but needed something to separate her from the Amy Winehouses and Katie Meluas of this world. Her outfits are not layered with deep philosophies; they are just increasingly more ugly and shocking than last week's mess. It wasn’t as if she started off with a narrative in her work, wearing designs that created a real artistic discussion. What she did is she started wearing quirky things to get noticed, and as her outfits escalated in insanity she gave them clichéd and clumsy meanings, as if that were her intention from the start. One day, will she finally run out of things to drape across her naked flesh? Will she then let her music speak for itself, or will she turn up at Heathrow airport, having murdered a bystander, their flesh wrapped around her shoulders, the dripping blood causing her 8 inch platform boots to slip on the floor, a protest against the ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell’ policy? (See, I would consider myself fairly normal psychologically, but even I can come up with macabre bullshit. It’s not that hard. ) Seriously though, this stuff isn’t art. It wasn’t art when she ripped off glam rock, it wasn’t art when she moulded her hair into the shape of a button, and it isn’t art when she wears half a cow. It’s just excellent PR, which journalists lap up because they can’t be bothered to research real stories anymore.

Lady Gaga’s image is grotesque but no longer has the power to shock. Her music is catchy but soulless. And her persona is false, spouting contradictory rhetoric that uneducated teenagers lap up like she’s the first musician to ever philosophise about the music industry. I see her fans gang up on interviewers in comments on Youtube, screaming nonsense such as, “Don’t ask her about fake eyelashes, ask her about Freud!” Jesus. To be fair to Gaga, if her audiences are idiots then why not take them for a ride. You can’t get rich and famous without their pocket money, can you?

The Fame. Lady Gaga’s aim summed up in black and white. Unlike her hero, Andy Warhol, Lady Gaga could never make art out of her commercialism. It is fame, not high art, that she wants to achieve. Maybe to her, fame and art are the same thing.

...London

There I was, covered in straw, surrounded by various farmyard animals, my newborn skin shivering at its first contact with the northbound wind...

So maybe the circumstances of my birth aren't directly comparable to those of the Messiah, but they're close enough. I was born in a place outside of London, a scary, unknown patch of land that's rarely seen in our national media or discussed by our politicians, unless something really terrible happens there. That's right, I'm talking about the rest of the country. Ahem.

 I was born and raised in the East Midlands, in a place that could easily be described as both a post-industrial cesspit and a rural idyll. I'm not even kidding. My county has been used as a metaphor for shit in both Peep Show and In The Loop. You could be living in a town where, because of poorly cleared away Ironworks, your children are born deformed, where both the teenage birth rate and the obesity rate are higher than most of the town's young residents. Or alternatively, you could wake up every morning in your four-poster bed and smell the fresh country air as you make your way to the window and look down on the picturesque village below, knowing that in twenty years time most of the elderly villagers will have passed away to be replaced by commuting out-of-towners. 

To try and get back to my original point, what I'm trying to say is that I have lived in an underrepresented area of England since I was born, and living there has shaped me in ways that I can probably never fully articulate. Not only are my views on my own community affected, but also other areas, peoples, and ways of living. A person's view depends just as much on where they stand as where they're looking. In particular, living in a place like mine - which only really satisfies the elderly, the unimaginative, and the stressed - has strongly affected the esteem in which I hold our capital.

"A person's view depends just as much on where they stand as where they're looking."

Throughout my childhood, London was alternatively a frightening maze of dark alleyways housing only the scariest and deadliest criminals, and an Illyrian paradise with unforgettable characters at every turn, where every second is full of enjoyment, culture, and intrigue. In short, my friends and I thought it the most exciting place in the world, despite all the murders and stuff. Whatever it was, it wasn't the boring, nondescript town I'd grown up in. As Samuel Johnson famously put it, “When a man is tired of London he is tired of life, for there is in London all that man can afford.” You can't blame a girl for having unrealistic expectations. 

It appears as though I couldn't shake these Utopian images of unrelenting amusement from my mind, as I chose a London university over a Northern one, despite having to settle for a Single Honours. Like Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, there was a place along a yellow brick road (or in my case, the M1) that potentially held the key to all life's problems. However this is where the simile ends, as whereas Dorothy wanted to return to her provincial country life, I wanted to escape it. I never understood the idea behind programmes such as Escape to the Country. I was eighteen. I was fairly pragmatic, but still secretly believed that I would bump into famous people all the time (so far only Piers Morgan and Kate Thornton – where are the good ones hiding?) It seemed that there was more opportunity in London than the rest of the country put together. If Madonna can go from small town girl to Material Girl just by uprooting to the city, then surely anyone can? (Albeit with less scary upper arms.)

Here's the thing though: when you enter the Emerald City you can no longer see the whole, luminous image. You are no longer looking in, but looking out, and it changes your perception completely. I am still completely in love with this city, three years after moving here to study. Yet I know that I cannot shop every day, cannot party or go to the theatre every night: images of an 'Illyrian paradise' are superimposed with my daily life; buying bread and milk, paying bills, studying. I see more of the school library than I do of anything else; it took me over two years until I finally got round to visiting the national gallery. (Next time I'm planning to go to the National Portrait Gallery, somewhere I've been meaning to visit since I was a starry-eyed first year.) 

Don't get me wrong; I'm still a country girl in a bigger world. Having never witnessed first hand the true brutality of its streets, I still walk around London without a care in the world, unaware of what's around the corner. Having been brought up in a predominantly White area I'm still a little awkward and overly cautious when talking to people from a minority background. I also don't carry an A to Z, despite it being one of the most essential items a Londoner can carry. It's easy to fall into the naive mindset that as soon as you exit the Underground, your destination will be right in front of you. I can't help but wonder; can an outsider ever really understand this city? While my first hand experience of living here has changed my perceptions into something much more realistic, sometimes I feel like I am only skimming the surface. Is London a Utopia or a Dystopia, or can be it both? Is it different things at different times to different people? Will I too, at the age of fifty, tire of life and flee back to the countryside?

I think, despite the excitement and the thrills of this wonderful city, that deep down, my real happiness and contentment lies in the fact that at any time, I can click my red ruby heels (should that be Wellingtons?) and go back to the countryside anytime that I like. Perhaps me and Dorothy aren't so different after all.